Little Red Cap (Final)

1 At childhood’s end, the houses petered out

2 into playing fields, the factory, allotments
3 kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
4 the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
5 till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
6 It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

7 He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud

8 in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
9 red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
10 he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
11 In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
12 sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,

13 my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.

14 The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
15 away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
16 lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
17 my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
18 snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes

19 but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
20 breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
21 I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
22 what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?
23 Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
24 and went in search of a living bird – white dove –

25 which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth.

26 One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
27 licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
28 of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.

29 Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,

30 warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
31 But then I was young – and it took ten years
32 in the woods to tell that a mushroom
33 stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
34 are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
35 howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
36 season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
37 to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
38 to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
39 as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
40 the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
41 I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
42 Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

BOW- mrs rip van winkle, medusa